Libertarians Of South Central Kansas: February 2015

February 10, 2015

Libertarians Of South Central Kansas (LSOCK) meet for Supper and discussion every Tuesday at Cathy’s Westway Cafe located at 1215 W. Pawnee in Wichita, Kansas at 5:30 PM. If we have official business to conduct or a featured guest speaker, that will begin at 6:00 PM. All who support personal responsibility and individual liberty are invited to attend.

To receive the LSOCK NEWS and LSOCK NEWS Alerts! via email please contact Steven Rosile at sarasile@att.net or 316 618-1339.

Contact the Libertarian Party of Kansas or LSOCK at:

LPKS / LSOCK
P.O. Box 2456
Wichita, Kansas 67201

Ph. (800) 335-1776

On the Web please go to LPKS.org or to the LSOCK Blog at:

www.libertariansofsouthcentralkansas.blogspot.com

LSOCK NEWS

IN THIS ISSUE:

From The Editor
Open Letter To Keen and Eileen Umbehr
Kansas Libertarian Party Convention
LSOCK Officer Elections Coming Up
If The U.S. Had Stayed Out Of WWI

From The Editor

Hello everyone,

This is my first LSOCK News in quite some time. Last year was both exciting and exhausting for me and so many other Kansas Libertarians.

We had planned for and hoped to achieve major party status last year but due to extremely unfortunate circumstances that goal was not realized.

Despite that we still saw a year that was a success. A success in that many more Kansans became aware of our party, a lot of new contacts were made, our registered voters/membership increased and many new activists joined our ranks.

Much of this is due to the efforts of Keen and Eileen Umbehr. See my open letter to them below expressing my (and our) appreciation.

Other items of interest below are the 2015 LPKS State Convention and upcoming elections for LSOCK officers.

Please come and join us any Tuesday at the newly remodeled Cathy’s Westway Cafe.

For Liberty,

Steven A. Rosile

Editor, LSOCK News

Open Letter To Keen and Eileen Umbehr

This letter is to you Keen, to express my heartfelt appreciation for your inspiring campaign for Governor in 2014. You traveled all over the state appearing and speaking to groups of Kansans large and small. You are the first real champion the Libertarian Party of Kansas has ever really had considering the length and breadth of your campaign for Governor, presenting yourself, your candidacy and our party in those many months of constant traveling, making appearances and speaking at events.

You worked tirelessly to achieve 5% or more of the vote in order to make the LPKS a major party in Kansas. Unbelievable, after all your effort and hard work, you only received 4% of the vote.

I know you, along with all of us, were shocked and discouraged at this outcome.

The fact is that this result was due not to any failings on your part, Keen, but from the fact that the incumbent Governor was so unpopular within his own party that a little known democrat Kansas House Representative actually had a shot at beating him. Many Republicans and independents that would have voted for you instead held their noses and voted for the incumbent to prevent the democrat from becoming Governor.

Thank you Keen, from the bottom of my heart, for your having championed the Libertarian Party of Kansas, increasing our visibility and our number of contacts across the state.

Thank you too, Eileen, for all of your hard work in supporting Keen and the LPKS as Treasurer and campaign organizer for Keen for those many months.

I know I speak for all Kansas Libertarians and all freedom loving citizens of this state with this letter.

Thank you Keen and Eileen Umbehr.

For Liberty,

Steven A. Rosile

4^th District Coordinator,

Libertarian Party of Kansas

Kansas Libertarian Party Convention

The 2015 Kansas Libertarian Party Convention will be held in Salina, Kansas April 17, 18 and 19. The location and details will be announced as they are finalized. A rough outline of the events are below:

On Friday evening, April 17 there will be an informal mixer, Saturday the 18^th will be the Business Meetings in morning and afternoon sessions and on Sunday morning there will be an Executive Committee meeting open to the public.

Business at the Annual Meeting in odd-numbered years includes election of LPKS Executive Committee Officers, Amending the LPKS Constitution and By Laws and any other business on the Agenda set by the LPKS Chair and Excom.

LPKS Executive Committee Offices are Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer and four District Coordinators, one from each Congressional District. The District Coordinators must live in the particular district they are to represent and are elected by LPKS members from each particular district. Only those members from the 1^st Congressional District can vote for that district’s Coordinator, while members from the 2^nd Congressional District vote for that district’s Coordinator, etc.

The Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and Treasurer are elected by the whole of the attendees. The District Coordinators are elected only by party members that reside in each particular Congressional District. The current members of LPKS Excom are:

Chair: Rob Hodgkinson

Vice Chair: Sharon DuBois

Secretary: Mike Kerner

Treasurer Ric Koehn

Congressional District Coordinators

1^st District Barry Albin

2^nd District Rob Garrard

3^rd District Jeff Caldwell

4^th District Steven Rosile

If you are interested in becoming an officer in the Libertarian Party of Kansas please contact Chair Rob Hodgkinson at chair@lpks.org or Vice Chair Sharon DuBois at vice-chair@lpks.org or any other current officer.

LSOCK Officer Elections Coming Up

The annual election for LSOCK Officers will be on February 24 if there is a quorum. If there is no quorum then the election will be held March10.

The current officers are:

Gordon Bakken Chair

Steven Rosile Vice Chair

Drew Holland Secretary

Shawn Smith Treasurer

Mike Brincefield 1^st At Large

John Kostner 2^nd At Large

Nominations will be made at the Tuesday Supper Meetings up to and including the day of the election.

If you are interested in becoming an officer of LSOCK please come to the Tuesday Supper Meetings and/or contact Steven Rosile by replying to this email.

If The U.S. Had Stayed Out Of WWI

“If The

U.S.

Had Stayed Out Of WWI, There Would Have Been No Hitler Or Stalin..”

by David Stockman

July 12, 2014

url: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/07/11/commentary/world-commentary/what-if-u-s-had-stayed-out-of-wwi/

WASHINGTON – The first big wave of embracing a liberal international economic order — relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration — resulted in something remarkable.
Between 1870 and 1914, there was a 45-year span of rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment and prolific technological progress. In terms of overall progress, these four-plus decades have never been equaled — either before or since.
Then came the Great War. It involved a scale of total industrial mobilization and financial mayhem that was unlike any that had gone before. In the case of Great Britain, for example, its national debt increased 14-fold.
In addition, England’s price level doubled, its capital stock was depleted, most offshore investments were liquidated and universal wartime conscription left it with a massive overhang of human and financial liabilities.
Despite all that, England still stood out as the least devastated of the major European countries. In France, the price level inflated by 300 percent, its extensive Russian investments were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and its debts in New York and London catapulted to more than 100 percent of GDP.
Among the defeated powers, currencies emerged nearly worthless. The German mark was only worth five cents on the prewar dollar, while the country’s wartime debts — especially after the Carthaginian peace of Versailles which John Maynard Keynes skewered so brilliantly — soared to crushing, unrepayable heights. In short, the wave of debt, currency inflation and financial disorder from the Great War was immense and unprecedented.
With all that in mind, one important question only rises in importance: Was the United States’ intervention in April 1917 warranted or not?
And did it only end up prolonging the European slaughter?
Never mind that it resulted in a cockamamie peace, which gave rise to totalitarianism among the defeated powers. Even conventional historians like Niall Ferguson admit as much.
Had President Woodrow Wilson not misled the U.S. on a messianic crusade, Europe’s Great War would have ended in mutual exhaustion in 1917.
Both sides would have gone home battered and bankrupt — but would not have presented any danger to the rest of mankind.
Indeed, absent Wilson’s crusade, there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace — and no war reparations. Nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd — or later on, the emergence of Stalin’s barbaric regime.
Likewise, there would have been no Hitler, no Nazi dystopia, no Munich, no Sudetenland and Danzig corridor crises, no need for a British war to save Poland, no final solution and Holocaust, no global war against Germany and Japan — and, finally, no incineration of 200,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nor would all of these events have been followed by a Cold War with the Soviets or CIA-sponsored coups and assassinations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile and the Congo, to name just a few.
Surely, there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro, or Russian missiles in Cuba or a crisis that took the world to the brink of annihilation.
There would have been no Dulles brothers, no domino theory and no Vietnam slaughter, either. Nor would the U.S. have launched a war in Afghanistan’s mountain valleys to arouse the mujaheddin from their slumber — and hence train the future al-Qaida.
Likewise, in Iran there would have been no shah and his Savak terror, no Khomeini-led Islamic counter-revolution, no U.S. aid to enable Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.
Nor would there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our erstwhile ally Saddam from looting the equally contemptible emir of Kuwait’s ill-gotten oil plunder — or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blow-back a decade later.
Most surely, the axis of evil — that is, the Washington-based Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon axis — would not have arisen, nor would it have foisted a near-$1 trillion warfare state budget on the 21st-century U.S.
The real point of that Great War, in terms of the annals of U.S. economic history, is that it enabled the already-rising U.S. economy to boom for the better part of 15 years after the onset of the war.
In the first stage, the U.S. became the granary and arsenal to the European allies. This triggered an eruption of domestic investment and production that transformed the nation into a massive global creditor and powerhouse exporter, virtually overnight.

U.S.

farm exports quadrupled and farm income surged from $3 billion to $9 billion. Land prices soared, country banks proliferated and the same was true of industry. For example, steel production rose from 30 million tons annually to nearly 50 million tons.
Altogether, in six short years from 1914 to 1920, $40 billion of U.S. GDP turned into $92 billion — a sizzling 15 percent annual rate of gain.
The depression that could have been avoided
Needless to say, these figures reflected an inflationary, war-swollen economy. After all, the U.S. had loaned the Allies massive amounts of money — all to purchase grain, pork, wool, steel, munitions and ships from the U.S.
This transfer amounted to nearly 15 percent of GDP, or an equivalent of $2 trillion in today’s economy. It also represented a form of vendor finance that was destined to vanish at war’s end. As it happened, the U.S. did experience a brief but deep recession in 1920. But it was not a thoroughgoing end-of-war one that would “detox” the economy.
The day of reckoning was merely postponed. It finally arrived in 1933 when the depression hit with full force. The U.S. economy was cratering — and Germany embarked on its disastrous “recovery” experience under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.
These two events — along with so many of the above-listed offenses later on — could have been avoided if only the U.S. had shown the wisdom of staying out of World War I.

I need your help to recruit students into the Libertarian Party.

A new and fast-growing organization called Students For Liberty is hosting its annual conference in Washington, DC, February 13-15.

Students For Liberty is run by libertarian activists, and their focus is educating students about libertarianism. Its founder, Alexander McCobin, spoke at our Libertarian National Convention last summer. I am really proud of the work he and his team of talented activists have done to build Students For Liberty from nothing into a major organization hosting conferences throughout the world. I'm expecting over 1,500 attendees at this conference.

Students For Liberty members are already identified as agreeing with the libertarian philosophy.

Students who travel across the county for a three-day conference in Washington, DC are obviously highly motivated and interested.

I want to recruit these students to become Libertarian Party activists dedicated to changing the world.

I need your donation to help me reach out effectively at the Students For Liberty conference.

There will be a lot of booths at this event, so our booth needs to attract attention and compete effectively.

I'd like to raise $2,000 for new banners, posters, and other display materials, some of which can be reused at future events.

College students are notoriously short on cash today, but not after they graduate.

I want to get these students to join the Libertarian Party dues-free for one year. And when they join, I want to give them a free one-year subscription to LP News, and a free T-shirt or hat -- the ones that have been so popular on LPStore.org.

I'd like to raise another $2,500 to pay for free T-shirts, hats, posters, bumper stickers, and custom membership forms for this event.

Once these students sign their names on the line and become Libertarian Party members, I'm confident enough of them will donate in the future to make this effort worthwhile. I speak partly from personal experience. I joined the LP as a student 18 years ago, and I signed up for a $30/month pledge shortly after joining.

I've got a professional graphic designer helping me. I need your help to pay for the materials.

Please visit this special donation page (it uses the Piryx service) and donate $1,000, $500, $25, or whatever you can today. There's a progress bar where you can see how we're doing.

Please donate today, and help recruit students into the Libertarian Party.

Thank you,

Wes Benedict, Executive Director

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Libertarians Of South Central Kansas

Saturday, February 14, 2015

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